


a circle of quiet

by Lirazel



Category: Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Yuletide, Yuletide 2019, Yuletide Madness, Yuletide Madness 2019, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21890773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lirazel/pseuds/Lirazel
Summary: Deep inside Alice, there is a stillness.
Relationships: Alice Munro/Uncas
Comments: 18
Kudos: 46
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2019





	a circle of quiet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tenillypo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenillypo/gifts).



> Tenillypo, this is only a gift for you if you want it. As I was writing, I found myself trying to get inside Alice’s head, especially in her last scene, to really understand what led her to take that step backwards. I’m fascinated by her calm stillness in that moment and this was me trying to determine how she may have gotten to that place. So this fic has the same ending as the movie, and I understand if you want to skip it, though I’ve tried to make it as hopeful as any such ending can be.

He watches her. 

Men have started doing that, these last few years, as she filled out a bit, lost the scrawiness of a child’s body and the round softness of a child’s face. She doesn’t yet have the full grace of a woman and she can rarely think of anything to say when in the company of strange men, but the men don’t seem to notice that. In fact, they barely seem to hear anything she does say when she manages to speak. It’s her neckline they look at, or the flare of her hips made more dramatic by her corset. Sometimes their eyes trace the way candlelight gilds her hair or the soft skin of her throat--always exposed now that she is grown and must wear her hair up. 

The sailors on the ship, they’re worse than the men back in London. They don’t even pretend not to be looking at her whenever she goes by. She spends most of the voyage in the cramped cabin she shares with Cora, and it’s only half because of the lurching in her stomach reflecting the lurching of the sea. 

But it’s no better in Albany, all those soldiers in scarlet, and one of them winks at her. Alice can't stop her flush, and the man laughs.

“There aren’t enough white women to go around,” Lieutenant Harris’s wife laughs when she sees Alice’s discomfort. Mrs. Harris is a plain woman, plump and matronly and cheerful, and Alice envies her. When the men look at her, they look at her face, laugh at her teasing, treat her like they might an older sister. “Out here, on the edge of civilization, you’re a treasure more precious than gold.”

But Alice doesn’t want to be a treasure. She wants to be a person, and the way some of these men look at her...she knows they don’t think of her that way. She lies in bed at night and imagines she is invisible. 

It’s her own fault. As a child, she had never gotten the praise that Cora always had. Cora had been beautiful as a porcelain doll, and everyone exclaimed over. Alice loved her sister, worshipped her strength and bravery, but there was always, just a little, a tinge of envy when she heard Cora praised. After all, was it fair that Cora was strong and brave and beautiful when Alice was none of those things? 

“All the men fell in love with you, didn’t they?” Alice had asked when Cora came back to their room after her first ball. Cora’s ice blue gown was as beautiful as a queen’s, but it seemed she could not wait to get out of it. Cora grew irritated with their maid’s gentle ministrations and sent her away, jerking herself out of the dress herself with only Alice to help her. 

“I wish they would not,” Cora muttered, yanking her brush through her hair. “It is most inconvenient.” 

Alice, nightgown clad, bare legs dangling over the edge of the bed, goggled at her. “Inconvenient?” Being fallen in love with was what you were supposed to do, wasn’t it?

“They look at me, but none of them see me.” Cora tossed the brush down onto the dresser with a carelessness that Alice had never been able to emulate. “They look at me like they would a horse they’re thinking of buying.”

Alice wasn’t quite twelve then, and she hadn’t understood. At that age, all attention was the same, and she couldn’t yet imagine the fear a man’s gaze could spark. She had prayed, that night, and many nights, that she might one day be beautiful like her sister.

She isn’t. That kind of beauty will never be for her. Still, she looks well enough--her friends praise her and Aunt Elizabeth says she will make a good match. She had gone to her own first ball, glowing with eagerness, ready to take her place as a lovely woman with all the attention that attended it. And, she had thought, looking in the mirror at her pink dress, the curls of her hair, the color in her cheeks and the light of her eyes, she would have that attention--so long as she stayed away from Cora. If she stood by Cora, no one would notice her at all. 

By the end of the evening, she was clinging to her sister. The other women had petted her and told her how pretty she looked, and she had liked that. But her first dance had been with Lieutenant Daniels, and the way he had looked at her, the way his hand splayed across her back, had frightened her more than anything she had ever known. At the theater the next evening, a man with dark eyes and a louche slouch had smiled at her in a way that made her feel naked. Even Tom Murphy, who she had grown up with, playing games and climbing trees together, didn’t look at her as he always had, as a friend. Now it was as though he wanted something from her, and didn’t care either way whether she was willing to give it. 

And it kept happening. Not every man, of course--she wasn’t beauty enough for that, and for that she was thankful. How does Cora stand it?

Cora stands it with her fierce defiance, as she stands all things. Alice, meanwhile, shrinks back behind her sister, her wariness like a small animal’s, drooping her shoulders and hoping no one will notice her. When she feels safe--with other women, or children, or old family friends, or familiar men like Duncan--she takes a few steps forward, lets her own sunshine show. She will never be brave like Cora, but when she feels safe, she has her own steadiness, unruffled and mirror-clear as still water. Cora is all tempest, the crash of winter waves against cliffs, breathtaking, the place where beauty meets strength. Alice is a secret pond, pure and fresh and still. There is beauty in such a place, sanctuary even, but only if you can find it, and Alice keeps it well hidden. Those men, they would tramp about, loud and careless, shatter the stillness, destroy the beautiful peace of her private world. She must hide it, and the only way she knows how to do that is to go unnoticed.

\--

And now the Mohican, the youngest one, watches her, too. She feels his eyes on her like she feels the sunshine on a summer day, just as intangible, but just as undeniable. 

But it’s different. He watches her face. When he looks at her, she is sure he sees the fear in the hazel depths of her eyes, the expressions that flit across her face, the tremor in her hands or the tentativeness of her steps. He sees how she _feels_ , and he watches her like that matters to him. 

And she does not shrink back from his regard. She decides, in a sudden rush of courage, that she will not hide. She will be who she is.

She tilts her head back, lets the sunshine warm her skin. Basks in his regard as she does in the sunlight.

Perhaps--perhaps he sees her, the hidden pool at the center of her, and he is just as still, and does not ruffles the waters. 

She feels as though she is taking her first tentative steps into a new world.  


\--

His hand, big and strong and warm, is under her elbow, is taking her hand to help her keep her footing, and his touch is so gentle it will not bruise her. There is no possessiveness in it, and it asks nothing of her, but even as it comforts, it sends lightning singing through her veins.

Then there is the battle of Fort William Henry, and after that the massacre. The world is blood and screams and smoke, too much _too much_. Alice is certain she will be crushed under the weight of it. 

So she withdraws. She hides inside herself, in the absolute stillness at her center. Her body moves through the world of heat, sweat, chaos, water, but she scarcely notices their flight across the lake or when they move into a world of cold spray, damp earth, rough stone. Nothing seems to touch her and she floats along, her body drifting without direction, her mind far away in a starless void.

_Get back!_

She hadn’t even known that she’d been drifting closer to the endless fall of water until Uncas’s hands close on her arms and he jerks her back. It is as though his hands have pulled her back into the world, into her body. Everything comes flooding back, unrelenting as the fall of waters. The echoes of screams--of rage, of terror, of triumph, of grief--a mirage of blood and smoke before her eyes, the aches throbbing through her body, the cold wet of her dress clinging to her skin: reality. As it overtakes her, she trembles, and finally she sobs. 

And there is Uncas. He wraps himself around her and she clings to him, desperate for comfort. The calico of his shirt is wet against her cheek, but warmed by his body heat. His hand cradles the back of her head, his heart pounds under her ear. He is real and solid and _here_ , and she wants to hide inside the warmth of him forever. Above the roar of the falling water, she hears the low cadence of his voice. She doesn’t recognize the words, but the sound of them is as warm as the body she rests against.

She weeps: for herself; for her father; for the strangers lying dead on a forest road, by a rough cabin, in a ragged fort, on the road to Fort Edward; for the world she had believed she lived in. For what the world truly is.

Still, there is comfort in Uncas’s arms, his warmth, his scent, the rhythm of his heartbeat. It is that steady, strong beating that calms her sobs, her ragged gasps for breath. Where her weeping had been, now, in Uncas’s arms, there is space to seek out the quiet place that is still inside of her. For a moment, in the cave darkness under the waters, she sinks into that quiet and has a moment of peace. 

Then Uncas and his father and his brother leap through the falling water and the Hurons come and all stillness is lost.

\--

The violence she has experienced thus far lives in her mind only as chaos and disjointed flashes of vivid sensation. There is no sense of time, of connection between events, of significance to anything. 

But now, watching Uncas fight Magua, she sees each blow, each parry, the flow of the battle, unfurling before her. When Magua’s knife finds its way into Uncas’s gut, the moment is protracted so that it seems to last for weeks. She has time to see, to _feel_ every emotion that flickers through Uncas’s eyes, every flinch of pain across his face. His eyes meet hers and that moment that stretches between them is more than she could ever find the words for.

The pain of watching Uncas’s futile struggle against Magua is too great. She looks away, only for a moment, as he continues to fight, as he falls. But her eyes cannot stay away from him, and she looks back as he struggles once again to his feet while arrogant Magua stands waiting for him. The battle is over, the outcome already decided, yet Uncas drags himself upright in a show of pathetic, beautiful courage. 

And then--

and then Uncas is gone. 

There is no time to feel his loss. She moves, without hesitation, to the edge of the cliff from which Uncas’s poor body had fallen. She holds Magua’s eyes, but she is not thinking of Magua. A glance over her shoulder: the whole of this vast continent seems to stretch out before her, endless leagues of trees and mountains and rivers and valleys. It is so beautiful, with a kind of beauty that smites her heart. But in all that beauty, there is no place she could ever find peace. 

No, there is no peace anywhere, and there is no world Alice can live in. How could she stay in this new world now that she knows what it holds? But how, having been here and seen the things she has seen, could she ever go back to England, to her father’s London house or the Edinburgh homes of her aunts where she will be expected to care only about the things she was told to care about before? Now that her eyes have been opened, she knows that she could no longer care about fashion and gossip, intrigues and affairs. It would be there, waiting for her in England, too: the cruel, pitiless horror of life. Now that she has seen it here, she would see it everywhere. It would take on different colors in England, a veneer of civilization, but it would still be there on the streets of London, in the heather hills of Scotland. In her own mind, her own heart. 

She cannot stay here, she cannot go back. It is impossible. 

For the briefest of moments, she goes back to the damp darkness under the waterfall. She is in Uncas’s arms in a glade of sunshine and stillness, glass-smooth water and birdsong. 

But he has gone and taken that circle of quiet with him. 

But perhaps--perhaps...perhaps she could find it again if she follows where he has gone. It is so close, she is sure it is waiting for her. 

She steps back.


End file.
